80: How a Single Apartment Turned Into a $60,000 a Year Hands-Off Business

Jasper Ribbers is one of the leading experts on building an Airbnb side hustle, having done it himself with his Amsterdam apartment and having co-authored the bestselling book on the topic, Get Paid for Your Pad.

I was introduced to Jasper by Jesse Krieger (Episode 62, Generating Lifestyle Business Ideas That Work), and grew fascinated by his story. He gets to travel the world while his asset back at home earns roughly $60,000 a year from short-term Airbnb rentals.

And the kicker? Nearly the entire process is outsourced at this point, though it took some time to get there.

If your town has a hotel or motel, there’s at least some demand for short-term lodging — and you could fill that need.

This was kind of eye-opening to me, because there aren’t many Airbnb listings nearby, but there are plenty of hotels. As Jasper explains, areas of lower demand are often areas of lower competition, which can be a good thing for you as a host.

Homeowners and real estate investors should pay close attention to this episode, and Jasper even shares the story of a tenant who subleases his apartment (with his landlord’s approval) and has a nice little Airbnb business going.

I have yet to try Airbnb in either our own home or as an investment, but Bryn and I are staying at several Airbnbs while on our trip to Spain and Portugal.

I like to support the side hustle economy however I can, and I also like having a little more space than a traditional hotel room. In some meaningful way, it feels like a more “authentic” way to travel, if that makes sense.

What do you think? Have you ever stayed in an Airbnb or thought of listing your place?

Thanks for the podcast. I’ve heard about Airbnb but have never tried it. I like to experiment with Airbnb with my studio apartment as my side hustle so I bought the book. Hope to put that into action next year. Thanks to Jasper too.

Great podcast! I especially found useful the guest’s remark “it’s better to be the king in a small pond, then a citizen in a big one” – applying this to me, I will stick to one freelancing website to serve my clients:) The second thing I appreciated was the part about making empowering assumptions instead of negative ones. As a single woman, I made negative assumptions about using one of these places instead of a hotel even if I could get cheaper rates. For the same reason, I will probably not rent out my place, yet it was useful to be made aware of this.
Now I have been listening to several episodes from your podcast and it dawns on me that you don’t have these transcribed – wouldn’t such transcriptions help you with SEO, as in Google finding your podcast?

Thanks Rebekah! Reg. the transcriptions and SEO, I thought so too, but that wasn’t what I found when I ran an experiment earlier this year. So instead of the full-transcriptions I’ve started doing the “highlight reel” free PDF giveaways.